The Seminaries’ Identit Crisis

As models for ministry keep shifting, what’s a seminary to do?

On a recent flight in the friendly skies between Norfolk, Virginia, and Chicago, I happened upon a full-page advertisement for a computer typeface in the airline’s magazine. It proudly announced, “The Right Typeface Can Make Even Bad News Look Good.”

The visual focus was on an attractive, formal invitation—to an IRS audit.

I thought, “Now there’s a tip for ministry.”

Both churches and the IRS struggle with getting across a message. The most difficult element of the gospel message to communicate in our therapeutically oriented and success-driven culture is probably repentance, the call to a moral accounting. Any clear statement of God’s law, any reminder of our moral accountability, arouses in most Americans feelings akin to those experienced in response to an IRS audit.

This environment inescapably affects the educational preparation of ministers. Under the influence of mass media and the breakdown of institutional authority, churchgoing Americans are becoming religious consumers. They are choosing their own private forms of faith rather than relying on the authority of a tradition or a religious community. Popular taste is the father of religious expectations. Within American evangelicalism, seminaries and large churches have had to face squarely this new market orientation.

The so-called megachurches represent perhaps the clearest example of churches adapting to religious populism. While they maintain a conservative theology, these churches have grown rapidly because they appeal to the religious tastes of the unchurched. In 1984, only 100 American churches averaged more than 2,000 Sunday worshipers. Today that number has more than tripled, according to church-growth researcher John Vaughn of South West Baptist University.

How do seminaries, created to meet the standards of orthodoxy, serve churches—especially large churches—in a day of pop religion? I do not approach the question theoretically. I have spent my adult years as a member of a theological faculty, and I am a member and sometime preacher in a budding megachurch. I do not have the answers, but a number of questions.

Many of these arise from a look at the ways seminaries have served the churches in the last two centuries. As is so often true, history illumines the present. Many ministers did not—and still do not—attend seminary. But seminary education influences ministry for these as well. So I consider three images of ministry that have shaped the identity of American seminaries.

The pastor-theologian

The image of the pastor-theologian is the ideal for most theological faculties. It survives to this day in ministers like Eugene Peterson and John Piper, but it is no longer widely popular.

We catch a glimpse of the image in 1857 when James Henley Thornwell, professor of didactic and polemical theology at the Presbyterian Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, delivered the school’s annual inaugural address. He had surrendered the presidency of South Carolina College to assume the theological chair. The seminary faced a crisis, and everyone there knew that Thornwell had come to save the school. So he stood before a grateful and expectant audience.

The address was typical of seminary addresses in the first half of the nineteenth century. It attacked deists, transcendentalists, and assorted liberals. Thornwell made clear his purpose in coming to the seminary: to enter the battle for the minds of men. His calling was the defense of rational orthodoxy.

“The great work of seminaries and theological professors now,” he said, “is to meet the altered aspects of infidelity; and not only to vindicate the external evidences of Christianity, but the internal, by showing the complete harmony of sound philosophy and theology.”

It is hard to imagine an address like Thornwell’s in our time. Few of us—pastors or professors—believe that the “great work of seminaries and theological professors” is harmonizing “sound philosophy and theology.”

Seminaries emerged and grew, however, with this image. The Puritans called it a “learned ministry” and brought to New England an English educational approach centered in colleges designed to produce public servants.

Once Harvard and Yale were established, students gained enough theology to serve as public leaders, but technical study of theology and preparation for the ministry were left for the years after graduation. Ministers had to pick up their theological studies by apprenticing themselves to an experienced pastor. In effect, these teachers created small, private divinity schools for what we might call “gentlemen and scholars,” though this pattern did not include Baptists and Methodists, who often eschewed seminary education.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many people were unhappy with the haphazardness of this system. And they raised troubling questions about the “enlightened” notions sweeping through the colleges, making them unfit places for future spiritual leaders.

After Unitarians got control of Harvard in 1805, more orthodox Congregationalists organized the first American seminary at Andover in 1808. As pioneers in seminary education, Andover’s founders fashioned the essentials of the seminary experience for the next two centuries, right up to our own time. They stressed adequate funds, scholarly study of Christian theology, a professional, specialized faculty, and a sizable library. The three-year curriculum focused on three areas of study: Bible, church history, and theology.

Four years later, Presbyterians in New Jersey established Princeton Seminary. Unlike Andover, with its independent board of trustees, Princeton was created by a denomination. The general assembly not only elected its board and faculty, everyone associated with the seminary—board, faculty, students—had to swear oaths of allegiance to the seminary’s version of confessional Calvinism. The church had the truth, so the seminary was responsible to protect it and pass it along to the next generation of Presbyterian leaders.

A passion for theology united the founders of seminaries for the half-century before the Civil War. They sought to defend a particular theological position against all rivals. While they tried to create an elite corps of educated and cultured ministers acceptable to the growing number of cultured, middle-class churches, they emphasized learning to think theologically.

The professional

A second image gained prominence after the Civil War, when significant shifts in American life changed the cultural context. The country that entered the war was rural, small-town, and agrarian. The country that emerged was becoming more urban and industrial. In place of the pastor-theologian there appeared the professional minister—often a staff member of a congregation or some specialist in the broader mission of the church.

Religious sociologist Herbert Wallace Schneider looked back in 1952 to his childhood at the turn of the century and described the professional minister in America’s villages and small towns: “The church building was physically the center of a community and the parish was the central, vital institution of religious activities.” A typical village church embraced well-to-do town residents and the more prosperous farmers from miles around. More members in the church made possible a more “professional” type of service. Larger congregations had a staff of a minister, assistants, a paid choir, and educational and social workers.

The most significant symbol of the new professional status was the degree. Early seminaries were groups of students who shared meals and quarters. Degrees were rare. But around the turn of the twentieth century, seminaries began granting them because degrees were the socially acceptable symbols of professional rank.

By the 1920s, theological students were still expected to know the Christian faith, its history and its Scriptures, but now they were supposed to learn from experiences in “field education” and theological clinics. Theological education and vocational preparation became almost identical.

The Protestant minister spent less time in his study and more time in active ministry. As the well-known minister Washington Gladden said in the 1890s, people wanted the minister to be a confidant and friend. His sermons were expected to be shorter.

A parallel development, new lay activism, appeared in the Sunday schools, missionary societies, and city mission societies. This generated interest in Bible institutes, where lay people could be trained as Sunday-school workers. Around the turn of the century, Moody Bible Institute and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) led scores of smaller schools into offering preparation for parachurch ministries, though they trained many pastors as well. The rise of these Bible schools likely influenced seminaries to create new practical courses and new degree programs for specialized ministries.

The enterprising healer

In the last four decades, ministry is probably best described by the image of the “enterprising healer.” The adjective is necessary because America’s success-driven culture now demands church growth, and entrepreneurial leaders are key to growth. Healer is appropriate because that is a dominant image for churchgoing Americans.

The ministry is now considered a healing profession. Defending religious truth or tradition is largely out of fashion. Churches and ministers are expected to meet the “felt needs” of the religious public. Within evangelicalism, evangelist Robert Schuller is probably the best-known advocate of the entrepreneurial healer. But you can find the influence of the ideal almost everywhere.

Ministries appeal to self-interest because they know that is what moves people. But in such a climate, how can people possibly repent? If church members themselves breathlessly pursue happiness, when will they discover the meaning of “taking up your cross,” or find that God’s strength is, in fact, “made perfect in weakness”?

As early as 1959, social critic Philip Rieff observed that the symbolic center of our cultural landscape was no longer the church building or the legislative hall, but the hospital. By the late sixties, therapeutic thinking had shaped popular vocabulary. Clinics, agencies, therapy centers by the thousands created a new growth industry. Traditional self-restraint governed by the standards of religious institutions was no longer healthy; it reflected hypocrisy or enslaving conformity. People needed to be freed from their past. Evangelical Protestants in the tradition of pietism were especially vulnerable to these appeals of the therapeutic image.

If images of the pastor-theologian and the professional minister centered on truth and competence, new expectations pressured seminaries and the churches to meet “felt needs.”

The most obvious resulting change in seminaries was the demand for training in counseling. Most professors of counseling accepted the new therapeutic ethic and considered themselves critics of traditional authoritarian churches and their “moralisms.” The new ethic, however, was not limited to counseling classes in seminaries or services in churches. It also appeared in a new style of preaching, in the design of worship services, and in the educational programs for the young.

A second expression of religious populism affecting churches and seminaries is the rise of the megachurch. With the decline of the denominations in American public life and the increasing privatization of religion, these large churches have gained an increasing share of the “religious market.” They have become the successor both to the neighborhood church and the parachurch ministry, something of a shopping mall that offers the religious consumer a host of specialized ministries at one location.

Concluding questions

These developments raise several issues for evangelical theological education at the end of the twentieth century.

1. Does the traditional image of the minister as a shepherd of souls arise from normative biblical roots? If so, how do we relate the seminary’s traditional image of the theologian and the megachurch image of the “enterprising healer” to the biblical image?

2. What about practical training? Early seminaries felt little obligation to provide training in the actual practice of ministry. Most modern evangelical seminaries do. But “consumer demand” has broadened the range of religious services and raised the question of a seminary’s ability to supply specialists or technicians for the diversified market.

In our day of specialization, can some highly endowed churches themselves do a better job of teaching specialized ministry skills? If so, who will be responsible for the “quality control” of these specialists? Can seminaries become better partners with the churches in teaching and maintaining the standards for ministry?

3. What role should “market concerns” play in shaping seminary programs? In their early days, seminaries had little interest in “market conditions.” This explains why so many of them were small and often on the verge of collapse. Equal concern, however, should arise from the fact that market pressures tend to overwhelm all other considerations in a church’s or a seminary’s mission, including the norms of truth and ethics. If ministry is determined by demand, who supplies the principles, objectives, theology, and ethics for ministry?

As guardians of the truth, seminaries may need to be more relevant. As colonies of the kingdom, congregations—including megachurches—may need to be more responsible. Both evangelical seminaries and large, market-sensitive churches would be stronger if they found each other.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.